Guess who's coming to dinner

Radio play goes behind the scenes of 1967 dinner that challenged America https://t.co/e79eb8Uo8f
(https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1333059699684544512?s=02)

“The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-november-27-2020/

How to write a book

Worth a try.
(https://twitter.com/philosophybites/status/1332264866145570818?s=02)

Carl Sagan, boy scientist

Did you happen catch my little cameo as my grandmother Rachel last night on @COSMOSonTV ?
(https://twitter.com/SashaSagan/status/1326570879741022208?s=02)

the speed of thought

"I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness."

Rebecca Solnit's classic manifesto for walking and how it vitalizes the mind: https://t.co/9lpAM3EqsT
(https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1321798442218303489?s=02)

"The Fire of Life": a philosopher's late appreciation of poetry

 Has it really been over three months since my last post here? How time flies, when you're busy posting to three other blogs almost daily. Some of those posts have noted and celebrated life's delightful springs, at some point I should go back and replicate them here. But time and life are short, as Richard Rorty noted in this late-life lament. It reminds me that Charles Darwin also looked back with regret at not having devoted more time to poetry (and music). 

The Fire of Life
BY RICHARD RORTY

Introduction
"I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts – just as I would have if I had made more close friends."


In an essay called "Pragmatism and Romanticism" I tried to restate the argument of Shelley's "Defense of Poetry." At the heart of Romanticism, I said, was the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken. No words, no reasoning. No imagination, no new words. No such words, no moral or intellectual progress.

I ended that essay by contrasting the poet's ability to give us a richer language with the philosopher's attempt to acquire non-linguistic access to the really real. Plato's dream of such access was itself a great poetic achievement. But by Shelley's time, I argued, it had been dreamt out. We are now more able than Plato was to acknowledge our finitude — to admit that we shall never be in touch with something greater than ourselves. We hope instead that human life here on earth will become richer as the centuries go by because the language used by our remote descendants will have more resources than ours did. Our vocabulary will stand to theirs as that of our primitive ancestors stands to ours.

In that essay, as in previous writings, I used "poetry" in an extended sense. I stretched Harold Bloom's term "strong poet" to cover prose writers who had invented new language games for us to play — people like Plato, Newton, Marx, Darwin, and Freud as well as versifiers like Milton and Blake. These games might involve mathematical equations, or inductive arguments, or dramatic narratives, or (in the case of the versifiers) prosodic innovation. But the distinction between prose and verse was irrelevant to my philosophical purposes.

Shortly after finishing "Pragmatism and Romanticism," I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. "Well, what about philosophy?" my son asked. "No," I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus's argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger's suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

"Hasn't anything you've read been of any use?" my son persisted. "Yes," I found myself blurting out, "poetry." "Which poems?" he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by, the most quoted lines of Swinburne's "Garden of  Proserpine":


We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

and Landor's "On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday":


Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

I found comfort in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of  impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.

Though various bits of verse have meant a great deal to me at particular moments in my life, I have never been able to write any myself (except for scribbling sonnets during dull faculty meetings — a form of  doodling). Nor do I keep up with the work of contemporary poets. When I do read verse, it is mostly favorites from adolescence. I suspect that my ambivalent relation to poetry, in this narrower sense, is a result of Oedipal complications produced by having had a poet for a father. (See James Rorty, Children of the Sun (Macmillan, 1926).)

However that may be, I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

Poetryfoundation.org
Originally Published: November 18th, 2007
==
Richard Rorty was an American philosopher best known for revitalizing the school of American pragmatism. The author of several books, including Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989); Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1990); and Achieving Our Country (1997). Rorty received a MacArthur “genius” grant and a...
Read Full Biography

Tweet from Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility)

Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) tweeted at 5:46 PM on Tue, Jul 21, 2020: Credibility Crooners: Tom Wright v Francis Collins. Religion and science have rarely clashed as dramatically as they do here. We have seen Tom's majestic book roost before and though Francis puts up a fierce fight he is doomed. He goes down playing, like the band on the Titanic. https://t.co/FFhBhdUfHo (https://twitter.com/BCredibility/status/1285707667386904579?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Emerson's evolutionary religion

“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” Emerson’s great call for religions to evolve, reject the “monster” of superstition and embrace the natural “miracle” of existence, delivered on this date in 1838. https://t.co/bUlG0GH4UQ

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 15, 2020

LISTEN

Dining (not drinking) with Willy James

“William James cannot save your life”-well, that depends (as we pragmatists say) on what you mean by “save” @JohnKaag @John_Banville
https://t.co/m1QKlGi4xe via @Lit_Review

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 2, 2020

“Robert Silvers, editor of nyrb, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’” Mine too, but too bad he didn’t drink (not that he needed an additional exciter of the Yes function). https://t.co/m1QKlGi4xe

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 2, 2020

Opening Day!

The first day of class is always exciting, even if it's a mini-semester in July and even if it's "remote"... but remote doesn't have to mean distant (except geographically). Looking forward to Zooming with you this evening, MALA 6050 "Evolution in America" students.

Our morning dogwalk was delayed by the rain, so I took the opportunity to make this little video out back in my Little House (shed, shack, cabin, "man cave") while we waited for the weather to clear. File this under "Introductions" (and "Opening Day" of course).